26 Years and Counting: I happened to note today that my first-ever professional publication was in April of 1979, twenty-six long years ago. I was sixteen and in high school when my good friend Jon Pitchford and I joked about making Dungeons & Dragons monsters out of the kinds of people who were the popular folks at school. I wrote up a short humorous monster description parodying the jocks and their hangers-on and sent "Narcisstics" off with high hopes to the official D&D magazine, The Dragon.

We didn't hear anything for some time (which I expected, it wasn't my first attempt at publication). I turned seventeen, winter turned into spring, then one day I stopped off as usual at the game shop (Gandalf's Den in Eugene, Oregon, where I was soon working for most of the next four years), and the latest copy had our article in it. I remember racing over to Jon's apartment at 13th & Kincaid near the UofO campus (he'd graduated from high school the previous year) with a copy of issue #24 to show him our names in print.

It took a letter to TSR (the publisher of both D&D and The Dragon) asking timorously about payment before we got our whopping $9 check. Split between the two of us, my portion just covered the cost of the two copies of the magazine I bought.

I wouldn't get paid anything for writing again for another sixteen years, when I did an article for Step-by-Step Graphics on Oregonian graphic artist Steve Cowden.

I'm Ready For My Close-Up, Mr. Atrios: If you've never been linked from one of the well-known blogs, you really should try it. As probably anyone here knows already, the Eschaton blog linked my parody TIME covers of Hitler and Stalin (based on Ann Coulter interviewer John Cloud's comments in CJRDaily) late on Friday night:

This blog gets between 350 and 600 page views (as opposed to raw hits) each day, as a mean average, and half of those are RSS feeds: aggregators and blog readers just checking in to see if anything's new. So, really, about 200-250 people actually looking for political stuff, the ocassional post on Macromedia Director, what have you. My big days are when I post pictures from a conference or something.

During the day before the TIME covers made it onto Atrios, I had between 13 and 38 page requests each hour. The first hour after the post, it jumped to nearly 1,100. It dropped down pretty fast, but it was the middle of Friday night. It actually got back down to single digits by the sixth hour, but as people woke up Saturday morning, it spiked again to 500-600 for several hours. The first full day after Atrios's post, the number of page views was up to nearly 6,000.

Sunday's traffic dropped back to near-normal levels  at least, normal for a weekday. The images were posted a number of other places (like Cup O' Joe) and without looking at the raw data more than I care to, it's impossible to sort out how much of that was people clicking on a link or the pictures embedded on other pages.

By Monday, most everyone visiting Eschaton had seen the images, but ripples were still going out. Cup O' Joe accounted for over 300 raw hits on each picture. Cheers and Jeers (now featured on the front page of Daily Kos) put up a link in a prominent final position that accounted for about 500 page views. The pictures showed up on discussion boards on Democratic Underground, Smirking Chimp, and elsewhere.

Between 7pm Pacific Friday when Atrios's post went live and 1am Tuesday morning  78 hours  the Hitler and Stalin covers I created got over 11,500 hits each , with about 8,000 coming directly as a result of Atrios's post and the others coming from people who'd seen them there and posted links themselves. My follow-ups (Idi Amin and David Duke) could be considered as a sort of control group, since they didn't get mentioned on Eschaton. The Duke cover parody is getting about 40 hits per day, likely from folks like you who have bothered to keep checking back to see if I did anything else good. That's a 150:1 ratio.

Vitamin B, Stat!: Remember a few years back when Ralph Lauren was getting it from both conservatives and liberals for using what looked like heroin-addicted teens in his underwear ads?

I was doing a little research on a letter that mentioned David Horowitz, and this ad for a t-shirt company on his Front Page site jumped out at me. Then I saw the second frame of the animated GIF (the right half of this picture).

I'm not normally one to make comments about how people look, but there's something just weary about the way these women look; a mite Coulterish. Is there something about long-haired women looking vacantly into the camera that turns conservative men on?

From the Vaults of TIME, III: Rather than stick to TIME writer John Cloud's juxtaposition of Ann Coulter and Stalin and Hitler (or Michael Moore or Eric Alterman), I looked for someone who more closely embodies the same spirit of venom-spewing. And I remembered David Duke, onetime Louisiana state representative, author of Jewish Supremacism and other titles, felon, and former leader of the Ku Klux Klan. While I was looking around his site, I noticed that while he still has some choice things to say about immigrants, Jews, African-Americans, and Jews, he was against the Iraq war  apparently because he believes it to be a Jewish plot  and figured that I'd try to anticipate TIME's response to the criticism of the Coulter cover with this fourth installment in my little series (previously featured: Hitler and Stalin, and Idi Amin). It also gave me the opportunity to do a closer parody of the original title:

TIME writer John Cloud in an interview with Brian Montopoli of CJRDaily about Cloud's cover story on Ann Coulter (for which the cover line read "Ms. Right: Fair and balanced she isn't. This conservative flamethrower enrages the left and delights the right. Is she serious or just having fun?"):

Brian, Brian, we have put Josef Stalin on the cover. We have made Adolf Hitler the person of the year.

I've done a little digging to find the covers of TIME in which Cloud's interviews of Stalin and Hitler appeared, oddly enough from the same date in 1933.

Ten years ago today, Timothy McVeigh bombed the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. Three years ago, this week's cover subject, domestic terror advocate Ann Coulter, said she wished McVeigh had gone to the New York Times Building instead. My TIME renewal notice arrived in the mail today, and went straight into the recycling.

Justice concluded that he didn't really mean to destroy or cover up evidence of Clinton administration failings that might come up in 9/11 hearings. But it seems somewhat inconsistent with Berger's own admission that he scissored the things to shreds, no? Ah, but they were copies, that's all. Nothing more. But were they copies with damning notes in the margins, perhaps?

On Wednesday, we quoted Justice Department prosecutor Noel Hillman that no original documents were destroyed, and that the contents of all five at issue still exist and were made available to the 9/11 Commission. But that point didn't register with some readers, who continue to suggest a vast, well, apparently a vast left- and right-wing conspiracy. The Washington Times, the Rocky Mountain News and former Clintonite Dick Morris have also been peddling dark suspicions based on misinformation.

The confusion seems to stem from the mistaken idea that there were handwritten notes by various Clinton Administration officials in the margins of these documents, which Mr. Berger may have been able to destroy. But that's simply an 'urban myth,' prosecutor Hillman tells us, based on a leak last July that was 'so inaccurate as to be laughable.' In fact, the five iterations of the anti-terror 'after-action" report at issue in the case were printed out from a hard drive at the Archives and have no notations at all.

I know Lileks is syndicated by the Oregonian's parent company, but that's no excuse for shoddy journalism. This isn't a difference of "opinion." The prosecutor in the case said there was "no evidence that Mr. Berger had intended to hide anything from the Sept. 11 commission" (New York Times). "Archives officials have said previously that Berger had copies only, and that no original documents were lost" (Washington Post).

Lileks's entire column is premised on the idea that Berger was trying to cover up Clinton administration "malfeasance," but that claim falls apart if the fact that he only destroyed copies from a printer enters the scene. So Lileks doesn't mention that, either because he's too lazy to read the news reports (but not too lazy to write several hundred words about Berger) or because he's flat-out lying. And by printing inaccurate or deceitful "opinions" like this one, the Oregonian is perpetuating that viewpoint; one that even the Wall Street Journal editorial board doesn't find credible any longer.

The conceit of both shows is a mock documentary filmed in the divisional branch of a paper supplies company, run by an inept manager (played by Ricky Gervais, the show's co-creator in the BBC version, and by former The Daily Show With John Stewart operative Steve Carell on NBC). The character (David Brent in the UK, Michael Scott in the US) is supremely confident in his own abilities. He believes he's not only incredibly funny, but that he's musically talented, and that everyone who works for him loves him and loves their job because of him. On this point he's completely wrong. Seeing him screw up his office and the lives of the people who work under him in either version is one of the most cringe-inducing television experiences next to watching surgery. The character's not a complete jerk — he seems to believe he's doing a great job — but you can see the train wreck coming if you've got any brains.

Micklethwait and Wooldridge don't seem to have ever watched the show, however. Or if they did, they appear to have gotten an entirely different message out of it. In their analysis, "Britons immediately identified with David Brent, the work-averse boss in the Slough office of the paper company Wernham Hogg, was because his casual 'It's just a giggle, really' attitude to management reflected their own prejudice." Oh, really?

To anyone who actually watched the shows, the point should have been ground in by the ascension of Neil Godwin, Brent's counterpart at another branch of the company in the second season. Godwin is given a position superior to Brent's when the offices are merged, and he proves to be everything Brent is not: genuinely funny, professional, and caring about others. The relief among the workers when he takes charge and Brent is eventually "made redundant" is palpable.

Micklethwait and Wooldridge say "Brentism helps explain why Europe has no Silicon Valley, no Bill Gates, no Warren Buffett." They have, however had people like Karl & Theo Albrecht (self-made German magnates who own Trader Joe's, part of Albertson's, and were listed at #3 on Forbes's 2003 list of "The World's Richest People", right after Gates and Buffett) as well as four other members of the top 20 slots that year. As for Silicon Valley, it's difficult to know whether they're referring to the chip manufacturing (much of which is now done in Asia) or the software development (much of which is now done in Asia).

If anything, "The Office" might be seen as the perfect mirror for the current US administration — far better than any "Saturday Night Live" skit or the sophomoric comedy of the mercifully short-lived "That's My Bush." While Micklethwait and Wooldridge figure that Americans "don't really 'get' the humor of 'The Office'," what is there not to "get" about the story of an incompetent, deluded guy who's in charge of the lives of people who have to manage to survive despite his blunders? Oh, we get it.

In Praise of a Union: Over the past year we've seen credit for bringing down the Soviet Union given first to President Ronald Reagan then extended to Pope John Paul II, on the occasions of their passing. Much ink was shed on how they'd provided the mighty rocks of Western civilization upon which the USSR was wrecked.

I have my own theories about how corruption, mismanagement, and overextension of power had weakened the Soviet structure before either of those men came on the scene, but since everyone's been giving the big guys a salute for standing up to power from Washington and the Vatican City, respectively, I'd like to nominate another entity that did more to show the weakness of the regime than either of them did, and at greater personal risk: the Solidarity union.

Established in on August 31, 1980, a year-and-a-half after the Pope's victory lap through his home country (a true sign that the Soviets were losing their grip in Poland), eight months after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and two months before Ronald Reagan was elected President, Solidarity began chipping away at Soviet control of Poland.

The members of Solidarity, including its original leader Lech Walesa, were on the forefront of the struggle against a totalitarian system. They were the people with their jobs, homes, families, and lives on the line. They and the people of other Eastern Bloc countries who risked  and in some cases lost  it all are the people who deserve the real credit for ending the Soviet system.

I'll be over here holding my breath until I hear everyone who praised Reagan and John Paul II give credit to a union.

We'll All Be Reading Michelle Malkin in Three Years: Poking around on Blogads, I saw something that didn't quite click with me, mathematically. On the part of the site where you can select ad venues, the MichelleMalkin.com site's description (not gonna link) mentions that its traffic (listed as more than 50,000 visits a day) "is growing ~30% per month."

Think about that for a second. Thirty percent growth per month. At that rate, 50,000 visits compounds to 375,000,000 (roughly the population of the US) in only 34 months. Everyone in the US is going to be reading Malkin by the next election.

That is, they would be if the claim were true. Of couse, there's no possible way Malkin's site could have a sustained rate of 30% growth per month. If you take it the other direction, numbers start dropping off pretty quickly. One month before it hit 50,000, the number would have been about 38,500; then 28,600; 22,750, etc. Two years ago, 100 readers.

If you're going to fudge the truth to anybody, you might as well do it to people willing to advertise on MichelleMalkin.com.

This is a Social Security Trust Fund bond, considered the best investments in the world, U.S. Treasury Bond. This is the most privileged of Treasury bonds issued to Social Security, redeemable at any time at full face value, unlike any other bond that they issue. These are the most privileged of their bonds. The President says it is nothing but an IOU. Well, here is what it says: This bond is incontestable in the hands of the Federal Old Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund. The bond is supported by the full faith and credit of the United States. And the United States is pledged to the payment of the bond with respect to both principal and interest.

The President questions that? He is questioning whether we are going to repay our most privileged debt to Social Security. We have $7.9 trillion of debt. He is adding to it at a record rate, borrowing $1.3 million a minute. Who is he saying we are going to repay and not repay?

Are we going to repay the Chinese but not the Social Security Trust Fund? Are we going to repay President Bush, he happens to have some U.S. Treasury Bonds in his personal portfolio, but not the Social Security Trust Fund? Are we going to repay other wealthy investors around the world and in the U.S., but not the Social Security Trust Fund? We are going to selectively default on our debt.

It Has Joined the Choir Invisibule! A Dead Flash Sound Sprite!:Irv Kalb writes with an update to a vexing problem he'd had with a Flash sprite not playing its sound (so what else is new?)

If you remember, for reasons of supporting Windows 98, I have a Flash Audio Player which is a very small Flash swf to play mp3 sounds. Under undefined strange circumstances, it would not initialize correctly.

I won't get into the gory details, but Markie (Castle) and I tracked it down late one night. The problem turned out to be that I had the Flash Audio player on stage (it was just a blank 16 by 16 pixel square), in channel 1, and I had a large graphic covering the entire stage in channel 2. The real culprit is that the Flash sprite must be visible for it to allow itself to be initialized correctly!

First, we just moved it to channel 3 so it was on top of the graphic. It worked perfectly - but I had this white square over my graphic. So, Markie suggested that I make it "Direct To Stage" (apparently that had defaulted to off) AND move it off stage. After doing that everything works perfectly. I wound up putting it back into channel 1 but still off screen, but since it's Direct To Stage, Flash thinks that it is visible and initializes correctly. Bogus, bogus, bogus.

I haven't double-checked this myself, but Irv writes that he's shipping version 1 of his product.

WMD Was Just the Beginning: The fly in the smear that the Bush administration is painting on the CIA for bad Iraqi WMD intelligence (apart from Bush's honoring of George Tenet with a Presidential Medal of Freedom) is that the WMDs were only the raison d'guerre.

Even if the CIA had screwed up the WMD estimates without meddling from the White House (which I do not believe), even if every other Security Council nation believed Iraq was an imminent threat (apparently they didn't, because they mostly stayed in the Uncoalition of the Unwilling), the rest of the intelligence on Iraq was (and remains) a failure as well.

The dozens of "decapitation" strikes meant to take out Saddam before the invasion didn't work. The planning of the occupation didn't work (three administrators and counting). Two years after Germany and Japan fell in WWII, American troops were not fighting insurgents and getting bombed outside of prisons. This is sheer incompetence.

Lundholm Cracks Portland: Peter Lundholm, one of the programmers for the classic Director-based CD-ROM game "Safecracker", came through Portland this weekend for the CHIF2005 conference with a bunch of his students from Sweden. I missed him Monday, when the gang went up to Redmond, but managed to hook up this morning by promising him a ride to the airport so that he could get down to San Francisco for FlashForward2005! Here he is, with one of the towers of the Oregon Convention Center in the background and a little of the downtown skyline in the distance.

Investigative Pulitzer Goes to Portland Weekly: It's nice to see the little people win big and it happened today when the Pulitzers were announced and Nigel Jaquiss of Portland, Oregon's alternative weekly newspaper Willamette Week won the Investigative Reporting prize for 2005, despite being up against reporters from dailies The New York Times and The Des Moines Register.

You may know that the fallout of the story led to Goldschmidt's resignation from the board of a shell corporation set up to buy Portland General Electric, a major Enron asset; a deal that was virtually assured while he was involved but which received far more skepticism without his involvement, was exposed as a bad deal for ratepayers, and has since collapsed. This is going to have to twist the knife for the Oregonian, given that they knew about the story months before it broke.

Congrats to Mr. Jacquiss and all his co-workers (full disclosure: my wife was the theater reviewer for WW in the early '90s). Apparently this is only the fifth time an alternative weekly has won a Pulitzer. Maybe one of these days the big papers can get back to doing some investigative journalism.